Various embodiments of the present invention are described herein. For ease of reference, we refer to these embodiments collectively as “Scopus.” However, as those skilled in the art will recognize, the invention itself is not limited to these embodiments or to particular details discussed herein. The scope of the invention is defined solely by the appended claims as presented and/or subsequently amended and by other claims that may be added later.
Scopus is an online system that provides access to a searchable database containing scientific journal abstracts with references. It is meant to be used by researchers, scientists, and students to help locate scientific papers, and to allow access to the full-text, where available, for those papers.
Scopus provides to entitled users the ability to link to the full text of selected documents. Scopus preferably is a WebSphere application written in Java using a Web Services distributed architecture.
Briefly, Scopus provides the following functionality to a user:
A search begins on the Scopus home page. To perform a basic search, a user enters search terms in a “search for” field and clicks on “search.” Scopus lists relevant results. The user has several options. He can link to an article of interest or refine his search by using a “refine results” box. “Refine results” gives the user an overview of his results by source title, author name, year, document type and subject area. If the user wishes to limit his results to a particular journal title, for example, he may select the title and click on “limit to” to have his results include only articles from the journal selected. As the user browses through a list of articles from this journal, he may click on an “abstract plus refs” button for more information about a particular article. From here he can read the abstract, view the citations that this article has received from other articles, and look at the references of this article which also offer links to their abstracts.
In one aspect, the invention comprises a computer system for searching databases and displaying search results, comprising: one or more databases storing information regarding publications, the information comprising author, title, date of publication, abstract, cited references, and citing references data; and one or more Internet servers in communication with the one or more databases; wherein at least one of the one or more Internet servers is in communication with and operable to transmit data to a Web browser application resident on a user's computer, and wherein the data is sufficient to enable the browser to display: (a) a search page for enabling the user to input publication search parameters; and (b) a results page comprising a tabular display of results that enables the user to sort results according to date, relevance, author, source title, and number of citations to each publication, and further comprising a list of publication titles, with each title having one or more adjacent selectable links to at least one aspect of the publication corresponding to the title.
In various embodiments, in various combinations: (1) for at least one publication, the aspect comprises a full text display of the publication; (2) for at least one publication, the aspect comprises an abstract display of the publication; (3) for at least one publication, the aspect comprises a display of references cited in the publication; and/or (4) the data is sufficient to enable the browser to display, for at least one listed publication, a numeral representing how many other publications have cited to the publication.
Other aspects and embodiments of the invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art after reviewing the drawings, detailed description, and claims provided below.